When someone comes to me for discipleship, I tell them that I only teach four things: how to read, how to pray, the story of our people, and fruitful living. (I have a specialty in practical doctrine of creation and dust-and-breath anthropology, but that falls under the heading of fruitful living.) Today, I’d like to highlight two books that have changed my approach to teaching the more recent parts of the story of our people.
The historical development of science is a bit of a puzzler for most people. Modern science was created by Christians, and arguably couldn’t have been created by anybody else. If you rewind a few centuries, you find people like Robert Boyle, Matthew Maury, Michael Faraday, Lord Kelvin, and many more–faithful Christians moved by their Christian worldview to investigate the world God made. They would be shocked and puzzled to discover that today everybody “knows” that science and Christianity are in conflict; they never found that to be true. I had long been aware that the “conflict thesis” was nonsense, and worse, carefully constructed propaganda (about which, see Of Popes and Unicorns for the riveting tale, but that’s not why we’re here today.) But the history around Draper and White and their promotion of the conflict thesis never quite explained the speed with which Christians adopted it.
Paul Tyson’s A Christian Theology of Science has filled that gap. Tyson shows how the roots of the conflict thesis lay, not in 19th-century academia, but in currents of thought that run back to the medieval European church. He also shows how deeply we’ll need to repent to come back to a proper understanding of science’s place in the world. (I’m not with him in his largely negative appraisal of young-earth creationism, but he’s fair, and offers a rare compliment on pp.145-6. I’d love to buy the guy a beer and chat about it for a couple hours.) It’s not a thick book, but expect to expend a little skull sweat getting through it. It’ll be worth it. You’ll find that it inspires you to think differently — and harder — about contemporary discussions in which both religion and science have a stake.
In a similar vein, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard sheds light on the development of American political thought and practice. It’s obvious enough from a glance at the news that today, the people of the United States do not have a single dominant conception of what it means to be American, what the good life is, or what good government should look like. Woodard’s thesis it that we never really had that, and he starts in the 1500s to demonstrate his point.
I was raised at a history teacher’s knee, and my father would often contrast the Plymouth Bay Colony and Jamestown, pointing out their rival religions, attitudes, and forms of life as a key lens through which to view the development of the early American republic. Woodard takes that observation much further, and his historical unfolding of the American founding is really helpful. We frequently talk about the “Founding Fathers” as though they were a single group of people with a single shared set of values; that is simply not the case. Rather, the documents of the American founding represent a struggle to hammer out a working synthesis among multiple competing visions. I would argue that synthesis, despite its notable imperfections, was largely successful, and remains an important guiding light for us today.
Woodard maintains that the eleven distinct and competing cultures he describes continue to operate today (here’s a county-by-county map), and offers his synthesis as a broadly useful lens through which to view and explain current cultural battles. That claim seems to be where he has garnered the most criticism. You’ll have to make your own determination about that. I will say that I’ve found his eleven nations a helpful filter in considering some interpersonal conflicts. If you’d like a quick overview, this podcast is a good place to start.
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